BSMS 71 - The importance of partnerships for sales-led growth

If your B2B SaaS company is sales-led, building the right partnership program can rapidly accelerate your growth and long term success.

But not every software company succeeds at partnership marketing. If you have a lack of resources, not enough strategy or just poor execution and enablement, this powerful go to market motion will go nowhere.

On Episode 71 of the B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks Podcast, host Brian Graf interviews a special guest: Antoine Vial, an Associate CMO at Kalungi, who is an expert in driving rapid growth in revenue with partnership opportunities for B2B SaaS companies.

Topics discussed include:

• Aligning your product to the specific set of features and capabilities that potential partners have as priorities
• How to compare the potential opportunity for partnerships vs other more traditional marketing channels like paid media, content, ABM and SEO
• How to incent and empower partners to recommend your software along with their own
• Why partnership plays can be better for sales-led companies than product-led ones
• Examples of successful partnership programs involving Amazon Web Services
• What indicators show that partnerships will be an effective strategy for your software
• How to build the right incentive-building SLA for each relationship to make it most likely to succeed
• How to measure success of your B2B SaaS partnership program

B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks is one of the most respected voices in the SaaS industry. It is hosted by two leading marketing and revenue growth experts for software:

• Stijn Hendrikse: Author of T2D3 CMO Masterclass & Book, Founder of Kalungi
• Brian Graf: CEO of Kalungi

B2B SaaS companies move through predictable stages of marketing focus, cost and size (as described in the popular T2D3 book). With people cost being a majority of the cost involved, every hire needs to be well worth the investment!

The best founders, CFOs and COOs in B2B SaaS work at getting the best balance of marketing leadership, strategy and execution to produce the customer and revenue growth they require. Staying flexible and nimble is a key asset in a hard-charging B2B world.

Resources shared in this episode:

• Partnerships & Channel Marketing: B2B SaaS Partner Programs
• BSMS 39 - When you should(n't) start channel partnerships
• 5 Third-Party B2B Partnerships to Consider for Your SaaS Business
• Partnerships & channel marketing –do I need a B2B SaaS partner strategy?
• 3 reasons to use channel partners for SaaS GTM
• T2D3 CMO Masterclass
• Submit and vote on our podcast topics

Brian Graf: Hi there, and welcome to episode 71 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. I'm Brian Graf, I'm the CEO of Kalungi, and I'm here with Antoine Vial, a fractional CMO at Kalungi who has worked with over 15 companies as their marketing leader and has generated over $30 million in attributed ARR. Averaging 50% quarter over quarter MQL growth for his clients.

For today's episode, Antoine and I discussed the partnership go to market strategy and why it's so important for companies that execute sales led growth. This is a strategy that's used by many B2B SaaS companies, but it's often unsuccessful due to a lack of resources, not enough strategy or just poor execution and enablement.

In this episode, Antoine and I discuss how to set up a great partnership play and how to manage it for improved credibility. Accelerated growth and long term success. Let's get into it.

Okay, welcome back to B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. And thank you for being here, Antoine. Antoine is our latest guest on the series. We're just trying to bring a little bit of variety of perspective into the show. I'm sure you guys are sick of me and Stijn talking to each other. And so I think Antoine will bring a really nice perspective into, into the conversation.

The topic that we're going to talk about today is a really interesting one. I feel like in my perspective, the importance of partnerships for sales led growth companies. I feel like everyone knows it's important, but I feel like a lot of people don't necessarily know why like whenever I've, I've been in a lot of companies where they're like, they are in a sales led growth motion and it's, everyone agrees that we should do partnerships, but nobody could really tell me either why we're doing it or what the importance of it is or how to do it well.

And so I think it's a really good topic to have. I think Antoine has some really good experience on this and hopefully it can be, it can be educational for some of you listeners out there. So without further ado, let's get into it first. Antoine, welcome to the show. I'd love it if you just gave a quick intro about yourself and give everyone who's listening a little bit of a background and then we can jump into it.

Antoine Vial: Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, thank you so much for having me here. I'm super excited about the opportunity of being a guest speaker. I've been following the podcast for a few years now. I'm really happy to be part of it today, especially to discuss the partnership conversation, especially in the context of sales-led growth.

And, in the GTM motion, I think I've been fortunate enough to work and develop some successful partnership programs. And it's definitely a topic that I'm passionate about. So a little bit about myself before we jump into it. I'm Antoine. I'm originally from France. That's where the accent is from. And I'm currently based in New York city.

Brian Graf: Really cool. Yeah. And thanks for, thanks again for jumping on. I think this is going to be good. So let's start with maybe just give some people a reference point for you as a marketer. You know, I always think of marketers, especially marketing leaders as T shaped marketers, and you can't be good at everything, but you can usually, when you get to the point where you are Antoine, you're usually pretty good at one or two things.

So where do you feel like your strengths are in marketing and what do you usually lean on versus what do you maybe lean on your team more to fill the gaps on? 

Antoine Vial: Yeah, thanks for that one. I think here I've been fortunate enough to be in this very unique situation where in a few years I've got the opportunity to work with close to 20 B2B SaaS companies.

During my time at Kalungi, which allowed me to really lead GTMs for so many different companies at different maturity stages, whether or not they were at the startup stage, or there were maybe more established 20 plus years established companies. And the beauty of it was also that it was in many different industries going from the gaming industry, going to healthcare, cloud computing, generosity, and really more than I can say.

Which allowed me to really focus on and carve, I guess, my marketing superpower, which would be the positioning and messaging. I think because of that, I've really been able to make that my strength, really being able to identify the right niche, according to the maturity stage of the company, the industry, and then really tailor the value props towards reaching that targeting audience.

And I would say that that's my marketing superpower. Outside of that. As a professional, I would say that my true superpower would be the ability to empower my team. I think this is really coming back from my previous life as an athlete. I really value the importance of really putting emphasis on making, allowing team members to be the best of themselves and coaching them through how to really thriving in in their work environment and I would say that this is definitely something I'm super proud of something that I'm working on every single day and something that I would put front first and foremost as my superpower as a professional. 

Brian Graf: Did I disclose this at the beginning?

I have a memory of a goldfish! Antoine is one of Kalungi’s CMOs and so he has worked with a ton of different companies in a ton of different industries and helped them to basically build and scale their marketing foundations and start to scale their marketing impact.

So he's a great person to talk to you about this topic. But yeah, let's get into the main event here. So why are partnerships so important to you? Let's start there. 

Antoine Vial: All right. I think I need to probably start with a little story to explain the why behind it.

Here at Kalungi, we start every single engagement with our clients with a fairly extensive go to market workshop. And during that workshop, we run an exercise called the ends of matrix for the ones that are not really familiar with it. It's a strategic tool, a strategic exercise that allows us to really identify growth opportunities and categorize them into four specific main strategies.

You have market penetration, market development. Product development and diversification. And for most of our clients, we spend the majority of the time during this exercise in the market penetration quadrant. And the first go to market workshop I ever ran at Kalungi, it was for an influencer management platform.

They were really trying to scale up their marketing efforts. And we started and we ended up with tens of options into that quadrant. We only had so many resources and therefore we had to focus on the one, two things that could really make a big difference.

And we decided to go for building a partnership program. And for this specific client, what was at stake was to be able to really scale fast, leveraging some existing brands that had a strong brand equity. So what we did, we worked with the product to align on the set of features and capability that would align with our partner's priority.

And we partnered with SeaTickets and Eventbrite, which allowed these partners to activate peer to peer marketing during sales of tickets. And that ended up being probably the most efficient program that we ever ran for marketing. It actually allowed the company to, to really raise their first round of funding, a series A valuation at around 20-25 million, which was really, really good.

That strategic partnership that allowed us to scale so much faster in a way that we could have not done if we were focused on focusing on different strategies. So that's why it's so important because the power of a well thought of and executed partnership program can really allow B2B SaaS companies to scale in a way that is very rapid.

I guess that's what led to the partnership. It takes time, but once it's live and it's working, that can really scale the growth opportunity at levels that very few other strategies can. 

Brian Graf: I think that's a great point, and I think you're, you're hitting the nail on the head on why a partnership strategy, when it's done well, can really unlock growth for a company.

In this podcast in particular, and in the T2D3 Kalungi theory, we like to say that you can't skip steps and you can't skip a base, but a partnership strategy is almost about as close as you can get. When you get one in place, that's good for skipping a step, it's almost a hack to efficiently grow.

Because if you can unlock the right partners, the whole benefit of the partnership play is that you get access to their markets. You get them to start referring you and it accelerates your market penetration. It accelerates the credibility that you have within the space. It can be a huge unlock for your company.

Now that's not to say that it's a free lunch. If you're going to do a partnership, you usually end up giving away some margin for that. You might have to customize your product a bit for the partnership or things like that. But if you can set one up the right way, it can be a massive, massive win for the company in a way and allow you to scale at a speed that something like an organic or even a paid motion may not be able to do for you.

Let's talk about the second half of the topic. Why are we so focused on sales led in particular? Product led motions, marketing led motions can also use partnerships. And they can be quite successful. But why do you think it's so important for sales led growth to consider this versus the other go to market motions?

Antoine Vial: Yeah, I think we need to redefine how these are different go to market motions with the T2D3 methodology. I guess we have a metaphor to really illustrate the point. With the product led growth being the rabbit or the small the small deals, marketing led growth being the deer.

It's a bit larger and in sales that growth being these, I guess the elephant or the very large size ACVs. And the idea is that during a sales-led growth go to market motion, your sales team is probably working with an enterprise, a large enterprise, very complex and long sales cycles. And really the truth is that to win any deal, they must interact with multiple stakeholders.

You may have different levels and get different departments involved. You may even have outside influencers. If you think of these very large enterprises, maybe you have an investor, think about a VC firm's influence on a portfolio company. And this makes the sales cycle very complex, very hard, and costly! And that's part of the go to market motion.

Something that is very often talked about in this podcast is demand generation versus demand capture. How much time and resources are you able to allocate to demand capture versus demand generation for product like growth? It's very unlikely that with demand generation, you're going to be able to have a really strong impact because of the length of the sales cycle, the number of touches that you need to have, the number of stakeholders that you need to hit. Therefore I think with partnerships, you have this really unique opportunity where your partnership program allows you to speed up that process. It may take a while before you find the right partner and you build that trust.

It might take a few pilots, it might take a few months, a few years, but once you are anchored with a partner, you benefit from much faster sales cycles. You don't need to build that trust. It's already built, which accelerates the sales cycles. There’s complexity in finding the right person to talk to within your prospect. 

You eliminate that time because you have a direct referral most likely or you are able to interact with the right stakeholders and all of this speeds up the process This allows you to close more deals faster, probably elevate the the bandwidth of your sales team and ultimately generate more more revenue, which is really why in the context of the different sales motion for sales led growth, the impact is that much more important.

Brian Graf: I've always seen the partnerships on the product led side and the smaller ACD side is just kind of a volume play, which is very legitimate and can be very helpful, but trust and credibility is so important on the sales led side. If you're early stage or you're going into a new market or something like that, it can be really hard to break in in a quick way, and having the right partnership can really allow you to break through and have a ton of credibility all at once, while increasing your volume, so it is a huge unlock for you.

Antoine Vial: Yeah, I think I have a couple examples here that would be helpful to illustrate real life examples. One of the clients that I work with right now sells CRMs for private equity firms, private equity firms by design, extremely complex organizations with multiple stakeholders in place.

Here, having the right partner, if you think about a private equity firm with multiple funds and the CRM being able to be sold to all of these different funds. If you find the right partner within that private equity, they can connect you with the right people under these right funds. You turn an opportunity that would have been maybe your average, average contract value being about a hundred to $150,000.

Now you multiply that by the amount of funds that you have under that private equity firm. 

Another example would be another client that I work with. They are a cloud consulting partner with a really strong partnership with AWS. Here, similarly selling expensive products and services to large enterprises with focus on private equity firms as well.

The time it takes to build a trust with these different either large enterprises or private equity firms is really time consuming. By benefiting from the AWS partnership, they get a shortcut to that. They get direct access to existing managed firms from AWS, and that speeds up the process significantly.

Here it's only a matter of time. Once you have these right contacts, you can scale up significantly. It takes time to build, but you can really see how that grows and how that scales as time passes. 

Brian Graf: And you've touched on this a bit, but just so that we round out the thought, is there anything else that the audience should think about when comparing?

Or, or prioritizing a partnership play versus just like a standard paid play or a standard SEO play? Like what other factors should they be considering when deciding which one to really focus their efforts on? 

Antoine Vial: Yeah, that's a good question. My answer may be a little broad, but it's true for anything that you do.

As long as you focus on what makes the most impact, then it's the right time. If we put that into perspective of the T2D3 playbook we talked about earlier, we put a lot of emphasis on doing the right thing at the right time and not skipping any of these bases from MVP, PMF, T2D3. 

The idea is that you would not want to run a partnership program if you haven't reached PMF or you haven't shown that you really have a product that people are ready to buy and renew.

Because if not, you may burn a partnership opportunity. So that's one of the first strong filters. If you haven't done that, you should not focus on your partnership. You may have different types of partnerships: maybe partners to help you design your product. But I think this is a different conversation here purely in trying to scale up your business. That's a really strong signal. So that's for the maturity stage of the stage of the company. Once you've reached that product market fit, you are able to identify the right partners and other companies, other partners that you know will benefit from your product and services and vice versa.

And if you can find that, then you should definitely go and prioritize your partnership. With that said, if you think of long term plays versus short term plays and really thinking about what makes the most impact, which is what I started this answer with, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket.

And really focusing on quick wins and long term plays. If you think of the SEO play, the organic content, the founder brand building, all of these can be put maybe in the same basket as the long term play with partnership because it takes time to build, but once you start getting traction, it really can scale up.

But I would never recommend to focus only on just when you reach PMF, because you have revenue priorities and you probably need some short term wins. So trying to make sure that you balance and that you manage the bandwidth of your team, especially your sales team in the case of sales led growth, where you probably need a lot of a lot of human capital to make sure that these deals go through and that you don't drop the ball and you keep your partnership healthy.

I would say, that's a long answer to when would I recommend prioritizing it? When you have true product market fit and then make sure that you have the team to support it and that you're balancing it with other types of plays that can be maybe focused a little bit more on the short term results so you can sustain until this program becomes scalable and actually live and working.

That would be my answer. 

Brian Graf: Yeah, I think it's a good point. Like SEO and paid are, are channels that you could probably run as you're getting your product off the ground. Or if you don't have maybe a hundred percent confidence in your product versus a product player, a partnership play, sorry. Is really something where you, you need to be able to stand behind your, your product and the value that it delivers.

Because you don't have that many bullets to fire in general as a a B2B SaaS startup, but particularly on the partnership side. You want to make sure that that shot counts. And so it is good to do that. To make sure that it's almost a more mature play from a product standpoint.

So we suspect that – as a company – a partnership play is the right move. From a sales motion. We haven't decided that it's the right move, but we're evaluating it. What should we look at?

What indicators should we look at within the product, within the market or the company. That this could be a really effective play for us. 

Antoine Vial: All right. Great. A great question. I think here you need to, prior to anything defining what success looks like, what are you trying to achieve with that partnership?

Increasing reach. Increasing or increasing cost efficiency, enhancing credibility, promotion, cross promotional opportunities, whatever it is. Then once you've defined that, you need to build that ideal partner profile which would be kind of like a secondary ICP. You have direct sales and then maybe indirect indirect sales where partnership will refill into that second category.

And then you need to think about, okay, what are shared or complimentary features and capabilities that your ideal profile partner profile shares with you. Give you a quick example, the client that I was mentioning earlier, He's selling a finops product that allows large enterprises to get full visibility into their cloud spending.

And then he ranks the finding by level of effort. So the companies can start solving these or taking a shot at these insights. What do we do when we try to look at a potential partner? There was another company that was automating some of the findings, automating the execution of some of these findings here.

We had a very clear shared interest where we were able to identify the savings and give visibility to the clients. And then the partner was able to execute it automatically. That was a clear play where we share common features and capabilities that really align and there is a win-win situation for both.

That's a really strong product indicator that you've identified the right, the right potential partner. 

Then it's building the right, incentive building SLA to make sure that the relationship is put in place. The program is put in place, but really that would be the first strong product indicator.

I think that's on the product side of things. If you think of market indicators, or more, what are companies that can help you increase your visibility into your target audiences, who are the trusted brands that you can benefit from really back to the example I was talking about.

If you think about a cloud, a cloud consultant, Google, Azure, AWS, these are definitely premium partners that would just like to have a very strong impact on the social proof that you can benefit from, but at a smaller scale than can be working currently with a company in the nonprofit space, selling a fundraising orchestration platform, which is combining automation and intelligence platform here, benefiting from partnership with agencies where the agencies will sell on their behalf to an affiliate program.

Here is a very strong market indicator where you're like, all right, these trusted digital agencies in the non profit space will allow us to benefit from their brand equity.  It will sell on our behalf so we don't have to do it here. Here is a really strong market indicator for how to set up a working partnership Play and then the last one would be how do you really identify these ideal partners?

Or how do you set it up in a way that benefits both of the old parties? I guess because sometimes it can be more than just one partner. It can be multiple partners And I think here a lot of people may think about you know, like What is the shared value for both? Should it be equal? I think every partner has something to bring to the table.

And as long as you reduce the risk to zero and you make it really clear what's in there for them with this partnership, then define the roles, define who is getting what and how is the pie going to be shared and make sure that it's very clear what you're trying to achieve, better visibility, increased reach, cost efficiency, all the things that I mentioned before.

And once you've agreed upon that, just make sure that you've. Build a strong relationship, have someone dedicated to that program and, and to keep that relationship healthy with the partner. And usually that's that's, that's going to be really, really viable and long term play for any B2B SaaS.

Brian Graf: And to your point. Like with a partnership program, it's not something to be taken lightly. To be successful in it, it's almost its own go to market play. You have to create a new ICP. You have to know what they care about. You have to know how your product or your service will benefit them and make their lives better, easier, make them more money, et cetera.

You have to get your own demand generation motion out to find and to contact those people. And to bring them in and then you have to sell them. And then not only that, but then often more often than not. You'll have to enable their sales team to make sure that they can sell you appropriately.

It is not something that you can just turn on and leave on. It's a very active play that you'll have to turn on and really put a lot of time and effort into but if you can it's super beneficial. The other thing that to point out is the balance of You know what's in it for you versus what's in it for them.

Almost every B2B SaaS company could benefit from a Google partnership or a Microsoft partnership or an Amazon partnership, but more often than not, smaller companies might have a difficult time convincing Microsoft that it's worth their time right to do or even once they sign a partnership agreement, who's to say how much effort a Microsoft would put in.

So I think what you were able to do with your cloud consulting client. And getting AWS on board is a big feat. And if you can do it, then, of course, the world's your oyster. And it really is a huge gain. But it's not a simple thing. 

Antoine Vial: Yeah, and I think some partners already have clear guidelines on what they are looking for with these partnership programs. AWS has a partnership program with multiple tiers. I think it's 130, 000 partners worldwide. It's not something that is a brand new thing. There are rules and there are priorities. 

If you're able to tap into it and find a common ground, where it becomes a little more fun is when you have to define these rules. And I think back to who are we getting as much as what we give? I don't think this is the right way to restrict the idea of what a successful partnership program is going to look like.

When you're the smaller company and you're trying to tap into the brand equity of your partner, you need to be okay to make concessions. You need to make it a no brainer for your partner to be able to say, absolutely, I want to partner with you. A good example is, we keep on going back to the private equities, but private equity firms selling your product on your behalf for their portfolio companies.

In this play, the only way they would do that, if there is a real advantage for them to really promote that product because they don't want to if not, what would they and I think here, one of the plays that was really successful from one of my client was to offer a success based program for these private equity firms portfolios, where this way, the incentive was so strong for the private equities. Because by pushing this success based program onto the portfolio, not only they were pushing a risk free service to their portfolio, but also if that worked, which was the case after a few pilots, then they were benefiting immediately from an increased value of valuation for these portfolio companies, which ultimately is the business of private equity firms. And therefore, if you can find what's the job to be done that you can help solve for your partner.

And you can put a motion in place with an offering that really aligns with that job to be done. Then you’re in for the long run and you probably have a really successful partnership with that partner. And that can be multiple partners. 

Brian Graf: It all goes back to the strength that you brought up at the beginning of the podcast.

It all goes back to positioning and messaging. And honestly, just about everything in marketing, if you could drill down far enough, if you position yourself the right way and you message the value that you can deliver the right way, then all of this kind of naturally flows and you could almost say it magically works.

But if you don't have the right positioning and messaging, then it could probably feel like you're just banging your head against a wall and partners either signing up and not benefiting you or just aren't signing up at all. And you can't figure out why. 

Antoine Vial: Yeah, absolutely. And I think here there is no rocket science about it.

I think it's trial and error and open communication with the partners. Being very straightforward and getting very direct and candid feedback, asking for candid feedback on what they care about and collecting that feedback and implementing it on it and then adjusting until you've nailed it. And then you can continue.

That's also something really important with positioning and messaging, adapting as you know, things change. Things change all the time. Priorities change. So being able to be agile and adjust according to the needs of your partners or even yourself, your companies and, and making sure that all of this is not, is never frozen, but rather kind of like an active program, right back to what we're just talking about. 

Active program updates, shared sales enablement for both your partner's sales team and your sales team, and making sure that all of this is a living and breathing program will help make it successful.

Brian Graf: Okay. So we've talked about why it's important. We've talked about what we should look for in terms of it being a good fit for your company. And we've kind of touched on the big steps to implement it, but let's say once it's implemented. You did talk about nurturing the relationship and everything, but is there anything else that listeners should be thinking about how do you get the most out of it?

Or how do you make it the most successful partnership possible? Is there anything else that they should know? 

Antoine Vial: Yeah. I would say step one, identify your partner profile. That's step one. Make sure that you update it as you capture feedback and try to grow these partnership opportunities.

Then align on what are the KPIs that you wanna track for revenue generation. Does it increase ARR? Is it a new revenue stream? Is it ROI? Are you able to quantify the return on investment for a specific program? One program may bring more ROI than another one. Then being able to see that and report on it so you can say maybe it's not worth continuing this partnership program anymore.

Let's focus on that one instead. So that's very much on the revenue side of things on the lead generation side of things and customer acquisition. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to scale up the number of marketing qualified lead deals added to pipeline or dollars added to pipeline?

Customer acquisition costs, all of these KPIs really trying to nail down a few that are going to be your, your no star. And you can compare all of your programs with the same KPIs to make decisions on whether or not it is beneficial aligning with your company's goals. And then from there, make a quick analysis on a quarterly basis by annual basis and really be able to say, okay, this, this partnership is performing this way. 

This one is performing that way, or which one aligns the most with our company's goals and then make decisions from there. This is really how you recommend any B2B SaaS companies to evaluate the performance of their program: define the KPIs and then compare them against each other or compare, compare them against existing other GTM motions like and see how beneficial they are and how they're performing against these other motions. 

Brian Graf: Yeah. From a CMO perspective or even a channel management perspective, that's absolutely right. But one thing that we haven't talked about a ton in this podcast, and I do think is really important is the enablement piece of a partnership play. 

How do you look at sales enablement for partnerships? How do you look at co marketing? What do you think? Do you have any advice on those fronts for people that have partnership plays or that are thinking about partnership plays to make sure that those things are successful because from my perspective like those pieces are the real tactics that make something successful or not. Once you have the initial incentive structure set and the positioning and messaging and value shared value Established.

Antoine Vial: Yeah, absolutely. I think here if we go a little bit more into the executional side of things. It's a shared sales deck. It's enabling your partner to sell on your behalf, training them and vice versa. You want to make sure that both parties or all parties are able to tell the right story. Check ins, regular check ins, updates, product featured updates that may be relevant.

These are super important. Shared regular syncs, sales enablements, so that can be sales decks, one pagers, landing pages, share landing pages same content, different branding. All partners or both partners referring to each other. So it's very straightforward for the prospect that this is a real partnership.

This exists for real. I would say these are super important sales and implement sales and marketing and element pieces that would make the execution of the partnership program be real. Then I would say this would make a successful partner, then maybe the elephant in the room is the attribution side of things and making sure that you set up an infrastructure that allows you to know where these leads are coming from, reward the right partners according to their contribution and vice versa. 

You want to make sure that you are able to set up an infrastructure that supports that. If we're talking at the sales-led growth level, the volume is usually a little smaller just by design because the average contract value is much higher. I would make it very clear whether it is through CRM properties that are set up in a way that allows you to make sure that you know which partner sent what?

For an affiliate play, you would want to have trackable codes that you can easily push from your product to your CRM and make sure that you have that in a systematized, systematized way that allows you to pull reports out of it and limit the manual input from the sales team. 

These are extremely important and that could be an entire conversation on its own, but really building that infrastructure prior to launching and updating along the way, while making sure that you have something viable and working. If not, you won't be able to evaluate the performance of your partnerships.

It's not setting you up for success, for sure. 

Brian Graf: If you can't set that up the right way, you're more just going off of good faith. And just hoping that it works. But if you can, then it gives you the visibility and allows you to report on the KPIs that you mentioned earlier.

You’ll make sure that those partnerships are successful. And you can double down on the ones that are working versus maybe discard the ones that aren't. It also sets you up for, this is probably a whole other conversation, bringing in partnership tiers and furthering the incentive structure to increase engagement and rewarding the partners that really benefit your business. It's good to have other partners that are more passive, but require less effort from your side.

Antoine Vial: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think back to the point of a living partnership program. It's improving, keeping the program alive, dynamically being able to improve upon what's already in place and really giving ownership to dedicated individuals in your team to manage these programs in the way they see fit.

Because they're going to be the ones that spend the most time. They're going to be the ones that get the most feedback. They're going to be the ones that really are able to identify potential upgrades of that program, whether it is tearing up or expanding or reducing, whatever it is. A really important part of making it successful is handing it off to someone dedicated to that because once it's in play, you want to have someone keeping a close eye on it and making it as successful as what it can be. By creating goals that can be aligned with the KPIs that we just talked about, and really making them own the success of the programs.

Brian Graf: To add on to that…, unless you're going to hire somebody new for that, this usually means saying no to something else. To make sure that they have the bandwidth to be able to do that. Sometimes this could work, but it's rarely something that you can just kind of lob over the wall and have the team catch and do really well at.

They'll need to carve out space to make it really successful, which is absolutely worth it. But it is a strategic discussion you have to have with the team. 

Antoine Vial: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think a bit earlier in our conversation about when to pursue it… do you even have the bandwidth to pursue these opportunities?

Does it make sense with your current priorities? If it doesn't, sure. Like you have to keep in mind that it's a long term play that would involve a team member to spend quite a significant amount of time on building these relationships and then maybe even have multiple team members involved, whether or not they're on the technical side of things, because you need to integrate with a potential partner.

And therefore there is a little bit of product dev that needs to happen. It's really something that you want to carefully vet before you put in motion and then of course with existing bandwidth You don't want to unless you've proven something you don't want to You know higher than build and then figure out it doesn't work Versus like build make it work and then hire to support the growth of that program.

Brian Graf: As with all major go to market initiatives, at the end of the day, it's like, what are you willing to sacrifice to make sure that this is successful? And if you can make that decision, then you'll be great, and if not, then you will struggle. 

Antoine Vial: Build slow, kill fast, or Whatever you want to call it, but yeah, that's the idea.

Brian Graf: Is there anything that I didn't ask that you think is really important to let people know about this? 

Antoine Vial: I think here the closing remarks would be that regardless of if you have reached PMF and you think you are at a stage where you should launch a partnership program if you're considering expanding existing programs, removing some of these programs, really try to think about some of these things that we talked about today.

And remember that a well set partnership program is not something that's gonna, that's gonna happen from one night to another. It's really, there is research within the right partners. So even thinking about it prior to being ready and putting the seed into potential partners' minds prior to being ready to launch these potential partnerships is really important and making sure that you leverage your existing network.

Most everyone has potentially a relationship with a potential partner or someone within that potential partner. And at the end of the day, for the sales-led growth motion it's a real viable play because it's a long term play and also it's a very scalable play just by nature. One partner can give you instead of with the same, maybe a little more effort, but on the sales led growth with almost the same amount of work.

To acquire a partner versus a customer, when I think of work, I think time, money, all of that, you get much more output. If you think of a one deal versus 20 or 50 deals for a potential partner. The scale is, is, is really significant. And as you enable your team to increase the amount of partnerships or increase the volume of deals coming from these partnerships, this can be a major revenue generator and, and really being in majority of building your sales pipeline and.

And, and being the main source of revenue if you build it right and if you scale it with consistency and you really find the right partners that you're going to build a relationship that's going to be mutual for both. I think that would be what I would want to close with.

It’s something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, so I'm really glad we got to talk about it in this format. Definitely an interesting conversation and happy to hear if you have any final thoughts as well or final questions. 

Brian Graf: I think you hit the nail on the head.

Thanks for coming on and for sharing all your thoughts on it. I think it's a really good go to market strategy that either people don't pursue because it's out of reach when it really isn't. Or they don't pursue it because they just don't understand what goes into it and what's needed.

And so I think this, you helped to break it down into bite sized chunks to where it really can be pursued by, by just about anybody with the right level of priority and expertise. So anyway, thanks so much for coming on and can't wait for the next one. Whenever you decide to come back.

Antoine Vial: Yeah. Thanks for having me. 

Brian Graf: Thank you to Adriano Valerio for producing this episode and the Kalungi team for helping us make this whole thing work. And of course… you for choosing to spend your time with us. 

As a reminder, all the links we mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes, and if you want to submit or vote on a question you'd like us to answer, you can do that at Kalungi.com/podcast. 

Every time we record, we take one of the top three topics and jam on it. Thanks again.

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